Intel x86 considered harmful – survey of attacks against x86 over last 10 years

"System management mode" is a tremendous wart and should be removed wholesale, with Intel adopting a more ARM-style trusted boot chain with explicit cooperation from the OS or hypervisor. And while you're at it, kill UEFI and install a pony for me.

(Seriously, SMM serves either bizarre ILO features that high-end vendors like but are rarely used, or security agencies looking for a layer to hide in.)

Actually ILO is pretty useful :-)

I have an APM (ARM64) Mustang, and this takes a rather different approach, but probably not one you'll think is better. The chip advertises 8 x 64 bit cores, but there's a 9th 32 bit core which runs all the time, even when the machine is powered down (although obviously still connected to mains power). It runs a separate firmware, in its own RAM, but can access the main memory at will and invisibly to the main OS.

One way to look at this is it's brilliant that we can just put a tiny Cortex-M3 in a spare bit of silicon and have it do useful management stuff.